Have you ever wondered what the Earth looks like from the Moon? Or what the Earth and Moon looks like through the rigs of Saturn, or billions of miles away from the edge of the Solar System? Well, now you can find out!

No, fair citizens of Hawaii, the US government hasn’t increased the level of psychoactive drugs in your water supply: That really is a flying saucer that just flew past your window at three times the speed of sound. Dubbed the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator, NASA is hoping that this flying saucer is the secret to eventually landing larger payloads on other planets — such as sending a human exploration party to Mars, along with plenty of supplies. The LDSD is on a pretty aggressive schedule, with seven major tech demos over the next 24 months, and could be used in a real mission to Mars in 2018.

NASA is preparing to take the next logical step after in-flight refueling between two aircraft — robotic refueling of orbiting satellites. This could extend the lifetime of many satellites indefinitely, and could play a very important role in preventing a Gravity-like scenario, where fragments of a single satellite cause a cascade of debris that destroys almost every satellite in Earth orbit.

Next month, Japan’s space agency (JAXA) will launch a space trawler — a spacecraft that will drag a giant aluminium and steel net while orbiting Earth, hoping to bag itself some space junk. NASA tracks around 20,000 pieces of larger (5cm+) orbital debris, but there’s an estimated 500,000 pieces of marble-sized, untrackable debris in orbit as well. If a single piece of space junk hits an orbiting, functional spacecraft, the collision is likely to be catastrophic — just like in the movie Gravity. If we don’t get on top of orbital debris now, it’s feared that one day the junk will be so dense that we won’t be able to leave the surface of Earth without being smashed to pieces.

NASA has confirmed that Voyager 1, which was launched on September 5 1977, has finally left the Solar System. Voyager 1 becomes the first manmade object to leave the Solar System, and in 40,000 years it will come within 1.7 light years of star AC+793888, before continuing on its millions-of-years journey to the core of the Milky Way.

Younger generations haven’t experienced staggeringly monumental historic events like older generations have, such as World Wars or landing on the Moon. Our historic events so far — mostly related to personal technology, such as the rise of he PC and the internet — are more of a slow, incremental burn. However, a team of UK scientists are aiming for that staggering historic event that the younger generations can experience, and have designed a mission to land three humans on Mars.

For only the third time ever, Earth has been photographed from the outer Solar System. At a distance of 898 million miles, as seen by NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini satellite, the Earth is a tiny, almost luminescent blue marble. If you zoom in (image below), you can even see the pale speck of the Moon next to Earth. As luck would have it, at almost exactly the same time, NASA’s MESSENGER satellite also captured an image of the Earth and Moon — this time from the inner Solar System, orbiting around Mercury (image below).

35 years after its launch, NASA’s Voyager-1 spacecraft has finally left the Solar System — the first ever man-made object to do so. It will now continue on a course that, in 40,000 years, will take it within 1.7 light years of a star called AC+793888 — the first man-made object to pass so close to another star, and potentially other planets. Eventually, millions of years from now, Voyager-1 will reach the core of the Milky Way.

Though it’s still only a concept, Reaction Engines believes its SABRE engine is the way of the future for space and commercial flight. With a secret new engine concept and support from the European Space Agency, Reaction Engines is coming ever closer to producing its engine and realizing its beliefs.

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